


Destiny

by Etrius_Lloyd



Category: Destiny - Fandom
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-09
Updated: 2015-08-09
Packaged: 2018-04-13 19:03:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,288
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4533627
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Etrius_Lloyd/pseuds/Etrius_Lloyd
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Inspired by the game. A fireteam makes its way towards the Vault of Glass across the landscape of Venus.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Destiny

Venus.

_ So this is where women come from _ , I think as I look up at the dark, brown clouds that make up the sky. No stars, no sun, no celestial marvel, just the volcanic fumes which the mountains spew out into the atmosphere. Hundreds of falling stars slowly rain down, their long journey ending against the many mountainsides which then bleed blue magma, magma like tingling ice to the touch. I can’t decide whether or not I like this planet.

I sit there on the edge of the cliff, watching the volcanic spectacle in the distance as my feet dangle above a sea as red as blood. In my head I make up a story of some long forgotten God who had come here to die, and bled out, drowning half the planet in its blood.

“Hey.” 

A pebble hits me on the helmet. I look over my shoulderplate . Phil walks up to me, her torn cloak dancing with the hot breeze. The Huntress' face is hidden behind the mask that keeps her from choking on the toxic air of Venus, and her armor is a dark brown. “Time to get going, little one,” she tells me.

Kev has already mounted his speeder, its engines humming eagerly. Kev is a Titan. 300 pounds of muscle encased in VANIR Type 0 heavy armor, you know, the kind they use to build small spacecraft. Just like me. I’m a Titan, too.

“Aye,” I sigh, and hoist myself back up. Break’s over.

We leave on our speeders, racing through the canyons carved into the planet’s surface, recklessly swaying past razor rocks and twisting turns. A wrong move would kill us instantly. We don’t care. Death is so common these days. We’re too busy enjoying the rush.

We exit the canyon deathtrap unscathed and move through the Shattered Coast, keeping the sea on our right. Phil takes the front, the two Titans at the back. The planet is different here, kinder. Barren rock turns to grass, and the vegetation grows stronger. There are trees, trees on Venus – at least I think they are trees – sprouting left and right, tall and broad and crooked. I jump over a lone trench through which the ice magma flows when the first buildings start to appear ahead. Tall, human, abandoned and overgrown. We were driven out a long time ago.

We cross the graveyard city without slowing down. Once you’ve seen one ruin you’ve seen them all. Kev amuses himself with shortcuts through the buildings while Phil and I stick to the streets, skillfully maneuvering past the countless wreckages left there to rust. 

“Movement ahead,” Ghost says, his robotic voice sounding in my helmet, to which Phil raises a fist and we stop our speeders. Kev looks at me and I shrug. I don’t know more than him. 

“Fallen?” Phil asks, and Ghost appears out of a cloud of light. Ghost is a symmetrical, spiky little  bot  with one, square, blue eye, and – in my opinion – the most awesome little dude in the system. Our guide scans the environment, shifting and morphing, twitching and clicking as he floats around.

“I can’t tell…” he reluctantly confesses. “The signal is being scrambled.”

“Fallen don’t scramble their signals,” Kev warns. “If anything they amplify it to invoke more violence.”

He’s right. I summon my fusion rifle from its pocket dimension, much like Ghost appears and disappears. I don’t like it. I know something’s there but all I can hear and see is long forgotten glory swallowed up by jungle and decay. Then something catches my attention.  A red glow coming from one of the countless windows. I recognize it a moment too late. “VEX!! Ambu -”

It’s as far as I get. The red beam hits my speeder square in the power cells. It’s like sitting on top of a missile as it explodes. I barely have time to realize I’m flying through the air before my back slams into the concrete wall and everything goes black.

Ears are ringing. Sound is muffled. I’m down on my back. Am I dead? No. Something hurts. The dead don't feel pain. Can’t tell what hurts yet. What happened? Hobgoblin. Has to be. Sniping assholes. I have to get up.

I force my eyes open and find myself staring up into the cannon stuck to the arm of a seven feet tall, metal man black as the night. A minotaur. Its bright, red eye seems to light up as its cannon charges. The blinking indicator on my HUD tells me my shields are down. This is bad. My helmet alone won’t stop that one.

And then there’s Kev. The magnificent bastard impales the Minotaur on his speeder blades at full speed and sends both machines crashing into the wall. It makes a beautiful sound. Moments later the Titan leans over me, no doubt grinning behind the golden visor of his helmet. “Can we nap _ after _ we kill them?” Smug bastard.

"Do I still have my legs?!" I ask, half panicked.

"Legs are fine. Your shields took most of it. Think you can get up?"

"Yeah."

The ancient traffic jam has become a warzone. Half of the cars are on fire or turned over, and red lasers flash through the air from all directions. Like us, Phil has taken cover behind a vehicle, holding in her hands a sniper rifle almost as long as herself, you know, the kind of gun that takes a flea of a dog at 900 yards. One by one the Huntress picks off their snipers, every one of her shots like thunder. Hobgoblins take three seconds to acquire and end a target, each and every one of them. Phil only needs two; one on a good day.

Kev summons a machine gun big enough to have been yanked off of a war ship, and opens fire at the dozens of dark figures in the distance while I let my shields recharge.

“Lloyd!” Phil shouts over the rattling of the gun, a red beam narrowly missing her head. “Nest in the big one at the end. Take it out!”

Now that I can do. I summon my Sultan SA/5 rocket launcher, aim briefly, and send a javelin rushing through the street and into the sniper infested skyscraper at the end of the street. The blast is beautiful. Seven stories worth of building are blown to bits in a bright flash of fire and devastation, leaving behind a charred, gaping hole. I whoop as the debris rains down and throws up centuries of dust, sending a cloud through the street. There’s a lull in the fighting which we use to regroup.

“Nice shot, little one,” Phil says, punching my chest plate.

“I hate Hobgoblins,” I say, switching to my fusion rifle again.

“Heads up...”

The massive dust cloud washes over us like a wave and reduces the world to a sea of brown. I can't even see Kev standing next to me. But then something pierces the murky air; bright, blue lights. I count four, six, ten, twelve of them, surrounding us. Reinforcements. The lights flare up, violently shining before dying out, and other lights take their place. Smaller ones. Red ones. At least a hundred. As the dust begins to settle the lights become things. Mechanical things. Black as carbon. Most of them  resemble something humanoid:  two arms, two legs, and something of a head. Some are large, some are thin, some even have horns and tails, but every single one of them has that bright, red eyes which stares at us.

“Huddle up,” Kev calmly says, his fists glowing with a dark purple energy.

“Lloyd?”

“Not yet…” I say, looking at the charging bar displayed on my HUD. “I’m at 90 percent.”

As one the Vex legion raises its charging weapons with the sole intent of disintegrating us in one attack.

“Now!” Phil shouts and Kev slams his fist together. There is this low, humming sound as the energies erupt and create a purple dome around us. Barely a heartbeat later a barrage of lethal energy rains down on us from all directions. But from the smallest gun to the largest cannon, nothing gets through the dome shield, like arrows on a fortress wall. Titan shields are built to endure.

"Denied!" Kev cheers, and raises both middle fingers at the droid army while doing his little dance safely behind the edge of his shield. I can't help but laugh at the sight of it.

But it's not long before the first Vex units stop firing and start marching towards the shield. “Here they come! Back to back!” I roar, gripping my fusion rifle. Titan shields are impenetrable but this only goes for energy, not solid mass. You can walk right through, which is exactly what they are planning to do. Phil channels her Light and molds it into a pair of massive handcannons made entirely of solar energy. 

We wait, our backs pressing against each other, death in our hands. It’s not fear we feel. There's only the rush. We are alive. Slowly, the Vex approach. They have time. The first one to step through is instantly torn to pieces by the rattling of Kev’s machine gun. The second is Phil’s; the solar energies turn the machine to cinders. I calmly wait my turn, wait as the first metal husk walks up to me. Joints creaking, movements sluggish, constantly uttering electronic gibberish. It's hand slips inside the dome and I aim, focusing my sights on the white light at the center of its abdomen. Most people make the mistake of aiming for their eye, but headshots barely faze Vex. No, you need to aim for their cores. The Goblin steps through the shield, I pull the trigger, the weapon charges for half a second and the burst of void energy disintegrates the machine completely. Next.

We fire, and we fire, and we don’t stop firing. Kill after kill after kill we stand our ground, invincible, covering for the other when they need to reload, like a well-oiled machine. It’s a game, really; who can kill the most? But the Vex onslaught seems endless. They keep coming without any regard for their own safety.

“I’m almost out!” Kev yells as he mows down another three. I am already forced to switch to my auto rifle. “We got five more seconds before the shield’s gone!”

“Are you charged yet?!” Phil yells, jamming her grenade into a Hobgoblin’s face and kicking it back outside the dome. The blast takes down at least a dozen. Sexy.

I watch as the bar finally fills up and turns yellow. Blue lightning surges through my fists, crackling eagerly. Super charged. My turn. “All set! Go!”

Kev activates his jetpack and rockets through the top of the dome, raining down whatever grenades he has left. Phil simply vanishes in a flash of light, teleporting to whatever place is not near me. I roar, raising my fists as the shield dissolves, and bring them both down like hammers on an anvil. And the world explodes in a bright, blue flash of energy.

It takes a while for the new accumulation of dust to settle, but it finally does and reveals a whole new level of ruin. More than half of the buildings have come down and now litter the surface with their scattered, stone carcasses. The Vex are dead. I count their broken corpses beneath the rubble, their charred ashes on the ground, their dead eyes staring still, and as I walk across the small scale extinction I have brought down I can’t help but think: _ This has got to be a record… _

A gunshot sounds behind me and I turn around. Kev walks the rubble, shotgun in hand, finishing of any Vex that have survived. A half buried Goblin reaches out to him, its legs and torso stuck under a massive chunk of concrete. Kev cocks his shotgun, ejecting a shell from the side, presses the barrel against the back of its head and shoots, ending what little life the machine possessed. “Nice mess you’ve made,” he says, cocking his gun again.

“I try.”

“Super charge kills don’t count by the way.”

“Bullshit!”

With a mechanical roar the Minotaur bursts out from under the rubble and charges at us like a 900 pound, metal bull. Its left arm has been torn off and most of its armor has melted away, but that doesn't make it any less lethal. It's fast, too fast. I'm still reaching for my weapon when something whistles past my ear and punches a hole the size of a fist through the Minotaur’s chest, knocking it flat on its back. Smoke rises up from the hole as the shot echoes through the city.

Kev and I turn around, still clinging to our guns. We find Phil perched on top of a small mountain of rubble, ejecting the now empty clip of her sniper rifle. “How you two ever survived without me is a wonder of the modern world,” she says, shaking her head as she walks past us. Kev looks at me. I look at Kev. Then we both shrug and follow the Fireteam leader through the ruin.

“Now what?” I ask, stepping over the Minotaur's corpse.

“Yeah. Speeders are down.”

“We walk,” Phil explains.

“Walk?!”

“The Vault of Glass is still, like, 30 miles from here!” I protest.

“36, actually.”

“Shut up, Ghost!”

“Hey, _ I _ didn’t blow up our speeders, remember?!”

“Ugh… This will take hours!”

“Less whining, more walking!”

“Dude, you’re buying drinks when we get back to the Tower.”

“Eat a dick,” I spit back at Kev, and activate my playlist. This is going to be a long, long walk.


End file.
